Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Read online

  The professors’ trek through Arizona and Mexico in 1927 and 1928 was typical of Bolton's trips through the region. After arriving in Tucson by train, Bolton met Lockwood and his drivers and headed south. He used Anza's diary to trace the Spanish soldier's route down into Mexico and then turned northwest toward the international boundary at Sonoita, Arizona. The trip took nine days. They ate canned beans, slept in their blankets, and let their beards grow. The cars’ high clearance enabled them to drive unimproved roads and across country over sagebrush and cactus, but not always without incident. When they became mired in deep sand, a Mexican boy with a team of horses pulled them out. Then a vacuum tank failed on their Dodge delivery truck. The professors found someone with a similar car, who sold his good part to them. That was lucky, as the closest place to obtain a new part was hundreds of miles away in Phoenix. In Sonoita Bolton hired a local vaquero to guide them, but he could not save them from all trouble. When a spring broke on their Studebaker, the drivers transported it in the Dodge to Yuma for repairs. Meanwhile, Bolton and his guide hiked the fourteen-mile round-trip to Heart Tank, a natural spring where Anza had watered his horses. The Spaniards had called the route “el camino del diablo,” and with good reason. The trail must have been hell on men and horses in the eighteenth century, but Bolton and Lockwood thought it was great fun. They supposed that they were the first to cover that rough trail by automobile.7

  One detail remained. Bolton and Lockwood had crossed back into the United States by way of a mere desert track, instead of going through a port of entry on a regular road. Thus Bolton asked Lockwood (whom he addressed as “Maestre de Campo”) to get in touch with the Mexican consul in Tucson. “Since you and I both shall wish to make other trips into Sonora,” Bolton sensibly advised, “we must not get into the rogue's gallery.”8

  These desert expeditions were among Bolton's most treasured memories. When he published Anna's California Expeditions, Bolton thanked his American and Mexican companions and drivers, including his wife, who drove “the stretch from Berkeley to Antioch and through the Coast Range to Coyote Creek.”9 Gertrude deserved the tribute. Retracing the Spanish trails in California was a common Sunday outing for the Bolton family. On one of these trips Bolton was driving while Gertrude sat in the passenger seat of their Hupmobile. A short circuit in the wiring gave her a rude shock, and she pled with her husband to stop, but he “stubbornly clung to the wheel,” his son recalled, “with a heavy foot to the throttle.”10 He finally stopped—in the nick of time. Gertrude jumped out and the seat burst into flames. What price scholarship?

  Bolton photographed his trips, scattering the images through his books with the credit line “Photo by Bolton.” He included maps with the information that had been won at the cost of broken springs, failed vacuum tanks, long walks, and nights spent wrapped in blankets on stony ground and tile floors. “Compiled from original data and personal explorations by Herbert E. Bolton,” the map captions read.11 They were among his proudest accomplishments. The Berkeley professor's exploration, maps, and photographs gave his books an air of authenticity as well as the stamp of scholarly authority. Bolton was no mere ivory tower scholar. He conceived of himself as a scholarly explorer, not unlike the studious Kino, who abandoned his academic studies for a life of exploration and evangelism in the wilderness. And, of course, Bolton the explorer-historian was very much like Parkman.

  No one who was training graduate students in American history was quite like Bolton. A growing number of graduate students went to Cal to work with him. J. Franklin Jameson's compilation of history dissertations in progress in 1926 show interesting data that Bolton passed on to graduate dean Charles Lipman. With thirty-nine dissertations under way, Berkeley ranked sixth behind Columbia (104), Chicago (99), Harvard (75), Pennsylvania (54), and Wisconsin (49). The only other western universities with an appreciable number of doctoral candidates were Stanford (13) and Texas (12). Most of Cal's history dissertations were on the western United States or on “America south of the United States,” Bolton explained.12 Priestley and Chapman may have guided a few of these projects, but Bolton directed the lion's share. By the spring of 1926, 31 doctors and 164 masters had completed their degrees under Bolton, far fewer than half of his career output of completed graduate degrees.13

  The staggering number of Bolton's students highlights his contribution to the development of graduate education at the University of California. Building a graduate program at any University requires a critical mass of students—enough people to regularly fill seminars, staff graduate assistantships, and hold fellowships. If these positions had gone unfilled, the University and the Native Sons would likely have withdrawn their support. A large part of Bolton's job was to attract resources to the history program and to annually demonstrate that those resources were being well used by showing that graduate students were getting good jobs and were publishing.14 Thus the California school—or the Bolton school of history, as it was sometimes called—was an enterprise that demanded constant recruitment of fresh graduate students, replenishment and expansion of public and private funding, and successful placement of finished masters and doctors.15 The greatest share of responsibility for these efforts fell on Bolton.

  The sheer number of Bolton's graduate students raises the question of his attentiveness to graduate teaching. Burdened with administrative work, dedicated to completing his enormous publishing agenda, anxious to get out on the trail, how could Bolton give more than cursory attention to his graduate students? Former students gave dissimilar but compatible answers. When Lockwood queried Bolton's students about their experiences with him as a teacher, they responded with uniform praise about his ability to introduce a spirit of cooperation in the seminar. Often there were more applicants for admission to the seminar than there were seats at his round seminar table. Bolton therefore interviewed prospective students in groups and quickly established who was prepared and who needed more work. Nevertheless, sometimes as many as twenty-five people were admitted to the seminar, so many that the overflow had to sit behind the lucky ones who had a seat at Bolton's table.

  The students who admired Bolton's seminar teaching praised his technique of asking questions that revealed to the student the shortcomings of his paper. Bolton always avoided humiliating criticism, they said. Rather, he believed that it was his role to encourage and support graduate student research. Any student's shortcoming in knowledge could easily be remedied, Bolton thought, but the damage done by public humiliation might never be repaired. If they worked hard—which to Bolton meant hard digging in primary sources—graduate students would ultimately produce good work if they had any talent. He taught by example. He seemed to be always at work in the Bancroft Library. When he took a break, he sought conversation among the graduate student night owls in the Bancroft barn. Thus, among his grateful students Bolton earned a reputation as a gentle, knowledgeable critic and a mentor who invited them to collaborate with him on a grand historical adventure.16

  For most graduate students the combination of avuncular advice and kindly support was irresistible, coming as it did from one of the most important historians of the day. For most of them, Bolton's gentle ways confirmed his greatness as a teacher. For most, but not all. Some thought he was just inattentive, perhaps even lazy in a selfish sort of way. The time that he did not spend reading and marking up papers could be used to further his own projects. Earl Pomeroy, who studied at Berkeley in the 1930s, later criticized Bolton for being lax in his oversight of graduate students, making light writing assignments, and sometimes requiring mere reports on research rather than full-blown research papers. Bolton seldom marked up or returned student papers, but even Pomeroy—definitely not a Bolton fan—felt obligated to point out that “he encouraged them, by example and general exhortation, to publish” their work, including some seminar papers. “He liked to speak of his students as…‘knights of the round table,’ giving them the impression that they were members of a trailblazing fellowship.”17 And, of co
urse, Bolton dispensed patronage to graduate students in the form of graduate assistantships and Native Sons fellowships—not to mention countless letters of recommendation for jobs. To Pomeroy (who completed his doctoral degree under the direction of Frederic Logan Paxson), it seemed that Bolton's students got all the advantages, that Bolton promoted his field above all others, and that he gave a disproportionate share of departmental and library resources to his students and his research interests. Sixty years later Pomeroy still thought it was unfair.

  Other graduate students thought Bolton was a savior. Irving B. Leonard went to Berkeley to study Spanish and taught in the language department as adjunct faculty. In the early 1920s, as Leonard recollected, Leslie Byrd Simpson (who was then a young adjunct faculty member) schemed to force Leonard out of the language department so that Simpson's job could be preserved. Leonard, with a wife and two babies to feed, was desperate. Bolton stepped in to make sure Leonard did not lose his teaching job and then took him as a student in the history program.18 Like Pomeroy, many decades after the fact, Leonard recalled with amazing clarity the controversies that occurred in his graduate days. Leonard was eternally grateful for Bolton's help; Pomeroy (who frankly acknowledged that Bolton had helped him too) thought of himself as being outside Bolton's golden circle and keenly recalled the inequalities that existed under his aegis. Both men doubtless were accurate in their recollections of Bolton, if somewhat selective because of their personal perspectives. Their memories testify as well to the peculiar pressure of graduate school when real and imagined slights are magnified and remembered forever.

  Bolton's laissez-faire style of mentoring graduate students seemed to become more apparent as time went forward. In the early days Bolton's close personal association with students like Hackett, Dunn, and Marshall meant that he also spent a good deal of time editing their essays and dissertations so that they could be published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly or by the University of California Press. He was relatively close in age to that first generation of graduates, who felt that they should share professional recognition and success in equal measure with Bolton. That closeness also meant that Bolton's graduate students from the early period felt free to criticize him as their peer, or at least to speak frankly to him. By the 1920s the age difference was much greater. The twenty-something student who arrived at the round table then saw a fifty-something, chain-smoking, workaholic academic powerhouse who controlled everything they needed at berkeley but the air supply. He spoke generously about sharing a great adventure, but the students of that generation did not expect to share anything with him in equal measure. By then Bolton was too large a figure, too important to their own prospects—and getting too old—for them to comprehend him as anything but a grand and (they hoped) benign and beneficent patriarch.

  Bolton's consistent and effective support for Cal's graduate students in history helped them to get academic positions. His job as recommender-in-chief was made somewhat easier because by the 1920s he could recommend his new doctors to former students who were already established at all levels of academe, such as J. Fred Rippy at Duke and Chicago and William Henry Ellison at the State Teachers College in Santa Barbara.19 During the course of his career Bolton's students held at least ninety-eight jobs in sixty-five colleges and universities. This figure does not count graduate teaching, part-time, or temporary positions. The students who landed these professorships deserve at least as much credit for the accomplishment as Bolton, but placements demonstrated the demand for his students.20

  Bolton's students taught in twenty-three states and the territory of Hawaii, but they were not hired uniformly across the United States. Eighty doctoral placements were made in colleges west of the Mississippi; eighteen were to the east. Southwestern states accounted for the bulk of the hiring, as might be expected. From the Sabine River to the Pacific Ocean there were sixty-six placements. California institutions alone accounted for thirty-seven, but Texas and Oklahoma together hired fifteen Bolton students. Just as one would expect interest in borderlands and Latin American specialists to have been highest in the Southwest, institutions in the Pacific Northwest and northern plains were least interested in Bolton's students.

  The center of gravity for Bolton's placements rested on the border with Mexico, but he placed some of his PhDs east of the Mississippi River, as well. Illinois and Michigan schools hired ten Bolton students. Five of them were priests and nuns who taught at Loyola University in Chicago and Barat College of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, Illinois. Prestigious placements came at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. The University of Michigan appointed two Bolton students. Before World War II, Vanderbilt, Duke, Ohio State, and Princeton hired Bolton's doctors.

  Bolton's influence was strongest in California, especially at Berkeley, where soon after his arrival he had added two of his men, Priestley and Chapman, to the history faculty. He was not finished. In the 1930s and ‘40s Bolton added even more of his doctoral students to the Berkeley department. Critics thought he went too far.21 Another two of Bolton's men went to the UCLA faculty. Seven more Bolton students held positions in California state colleges, and eight taught in private institutions. Nine teachers in junior colleges rounded out the list of home-state placements in higher education. In addition to these college placements, Bolton's graduate students filled scores of high school teaching positions. Ninety-two junior high and high school teachers were identified in a 1945 festschrift that listed his students and their employment if known.22 This figure no doubt understates the proportion of Bolton's master's students who taught school. There was no employment information for 162 of his graduate students (about 40 percent), but it is safe to assume that a substantial number of them taught at some time. Add to the identifiable teachers and professors the unknown number of other students who took his graduate and undergraduate courses, and the true extent of his influence may be roughly estimated. Hundreds of Bolton's students taught history in California at every level from kindergarten to graduate school. Bolton also directly influenced teaching in California as an official University representative to public schools. From time to time he toured high schools and junior colleges, reviewed their history programs, visited classrooms, and evaluated teachers.23 By the 1920s Bolton had built a teaching empire that spread from Berkeley to the remote reaches of the West and beyond, far beyond. Few history professors have had as much influence on teaching as Bolton.

  With 104 doctorates and 323 master's degrees to his credit, the size of Bolton's graduate corps was formidable. The number of women among Bolton's graduates is likewise impressive. Most of Bolton's female graduate students were master's students. In fact, 52 percent of all graduate degrees earned with Bolton were taken by women. When the figures are adjusted to account for people who took two graduate degrees with Bolton by counting them only once, female representation rises to 57 percent. From 1909, when Bolton's first master graduated, until 1944, when he hooded his last PhD, an average of nearly six women per year earned a master's degree with Bolton having directed their theses (see table, pp. 168—69).

  A phalanx of seventeen women stood among Bolton's doctoral students. On average, Bolton hooded a woman doctor every two years. The first woman to earn the doctorate with Bolton took the degree in 1925, but most of them earned their degrees after 1930. In an age when women were not encouraged to take the PhD, seventeen was a big number. According to oral tradition, Bolton discouraged women from taking the doctorate.24 It was probably true that Bolton advised women against taking the ultimate degree, but this may have been because he fully understood and frankly explained the difficulty of placing women in University positions. Women's colleges were the exception to the general rule of hiring men exclusively—or at least as the first choice.25 Four of his doctoral students were nuns who taught at Catholic institutions. None of Bolton's women were placed at comprehensive universities. Capable women historians, such as Adele Ogden, taught high school, or they went into other fields of
employment, as did Marian Lydia Lothrop, who worked for the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Whatever their employment destiny may have been, one thing is clear about Bolton's Knights of the Round Table: most of them were ladies.

  While women formed a solid majority of Bolton's graduate students, they did not get a fair share of the resources Bolton distributed. Assistantships and fellowships for women were in short supply everywhere. Frederic Logan Paxson asked if Bolton would take a woman from Wisconsin and whether there might be a fellowship or assistantship for her.26 The woman in question did not take a degree with Bolton—perhaps did not even enroll at Berkeley—but Bolton did see to it that a few of his women graduate students received fellowships and assistantships.27 The number of women so favored was very small and not in proportion to their numbers in Bolton's history program.

  Bolton's gender discrimination, however, should not be understood as a lack of confidence in women's intellectual ability. He consistently relied on women for assistance in Spanish translation. Department secretaries May Corcoran, Helen Carr, and Ellen Fessenden and her sister Josephine assisted in the preparation of his manuscripts.28 Mary Ross, one of his MA students, took an especially strong role in the writing of Arredondo's Historical Proof of Spain's Title to Georgia. “ The actual writing was done by myself, but so great has been her aid,” Bolton acknowledged, that the 110-page introduction was published separately “under jointauthorship” as The Debatable Land: A Sketch of the Anglo-Spanish Contest for the Georgia Country. Bolton's willingness to credit Ross as coauthor infers that she, perhaps like Skinner, had an important influence on his writing.29 In the 1920s Ross returned to Georgia, her native state, but then went back to Berkeley, where she supervised student teachers of social studies at the University of California experimental high school—yet another reinforcement of Bolton's influence on California's history teachers. Ross said that she continued to assist Bolton in research and editing.30 If so, he did not acknowledge her help in the prefaces of his books except for proofreading his biography of Kino.31 However great Ross's contribution may have been, in the 1920s his style took on the romantic tone that characterized his work ever after.